Company: Salsa Labs Initiative: Post-merger demand generation and positioning
Results at a glance: Webinar-influenced sales-qualified leads grew 5.7x year over year, and webinar-influenced revenue grew 15x. We built a repeatable program of timely, educational webinars that tied broad industry topics to specific product capabilities, used live audience interaction to surface prospect needs, and created consultative follow-up paths tailored to each organization — with every session extended through worksheets, checklists, ebooks, and videos.
A stronger product, a tougher pitch
In 2015, Salsa Labs merged with DonorPro, joining two complementary platforms. DonorPro brought constituent relationship management; Salsa brought digital marketing, online fundraising, peer-to-peer fundraising, and advocacy tools. A bridge between them gave nonprofits a wide sweep of capabilities covering more of the constituent journey, from managing donor relationships to running campaigns to mobilizing supporters.
Strategically, the merger created a more complete solution. From a marketing standpoint, it created a hard question: how do you market a broad platform when different prospects care about completely different parts of it?
A fundraising team wants recurring donations. An advocacy organization needs to rally supporters around legislation. A development director is losing sleep over donor retention. Someone else needs better constituent records, or peer-to-peer campaigns, or email engagement, or event management, or reporting. All of them could benefit from Salsa’s expanded capabilities. Almost none needed every capability at once. Try to explain the full suite to each of them and the platform starts to feel complicated, unfocused, and somehow not for them. Salsa didn’t just have a demand-generation problem. It had a relevance problem.
Reframing the challenge
I was brought in to rebuild Salsa’s marketing team and develop a better growth strategy: redesign the website, launch paid search, improve conversion, grow marketing-qualified leads, cut acquisition costs, and clarify the value of the combined offering. But the core positioning challenge was never going to yield to a longer feature list.
The obvious question was “how do we explain everything Salsa can do?” The useful one: how do we help each prospect recognize the part of Salsa that matters to the problem they’re trying to solve right now?
That changed the approach. Instead of leading with the architecture of the product suite, we led with the challenges nonprofit professionals were already wrestling with. The goal wasn’t to make every prospect understand every feature. It was to make the right capability relevant at the right moment.
From product promotion to buyer education
We built a regular webinar program organized around timely issues, emerging trends, and the practical problems nonprofits actually face — and designed it to be useful whether or not an attendee used Salsa at all. Rather than structuring sessions around product modules, we structured them around questions people were already asking: how to improve donor engagement, how fundraising practices are shifting, how to prepare for a campaign, which trends will affect nonprofit communications, how to mobilize supporters, what to measure, and how to get more done with limited resources.
That opened the webinars to a far bigger audience. You didn’t have to be shopping for software to get something out of them; you could show up because the topic mattered to your work. And it changed the nature of the relationship. Salsa wasn’t opening every conversation by asking prospects to evaluate a platform. We were helping them make progress on a problem they already had.
Content built for actual use
Each session was designed to hand participants something they could use that week: current trends, emerging challenges, best practices, strategic frameworks, concrete recommendations, plus worksheets, checklists, and supporting materials.
This was a real break from the usual product webinar, which is often a demo wearing an educational costume — promising insight and then spending forty minutes clicking through screens. We did the opposite. The educational value had to stand on its own, and product capabilities appeared only when they helped illustrate or solve the issue under discussion. The software supported the lesson; it didn’t replace it. That built trust and, counterintuitively, made the demonstrations land harder, because attendees weren’t seeing a feature in isolation. They were seeing how it served a goal they recognized.
Showing the product in context
Salsa’s breadth turned into an advantage the moment the product showed up through the lens of a specific buyer problem. A generic tour of fundraising, CRM, advocacy, and digital-marketing features can feel overwhelming. A demonstration of how a nonprofit might use one capability to improve a campaign is easy to follow.
The difference is subtle but it’s everything. We didn’t say “here’s everything the platform can do.” We showed “here’s how an organization facing this particular challenge could use the platform to do better.” So the same product looked different from session to session — a fundraising webinar highlighting one set of capabilities, an advocacy webinar another, a donor-engagement session connecting constituent data with communications and campaigns. The platform stayed the same. The positioning adapted to the context.
Webinars as a listening system
The sessions weren’t one-way broadcasts. We asked participants questions throughout and encouraged interaction, which lifted engagement but also did something more strategic: it told us which challenges were most urgent, how organizations currently handled them, where their processes were breaking down, which capabilities drew the most interest, what objections lingered, which topics deserved more coverage, and roughly where each participant sat in the buying journey.
That turned every webinar into market intelligence. We weren’t leaning entirely on static persona documents or internal assumptions about nonprofit buyers. We were hearing from the people doing the work, and their questions and reactions kept showing us how their needs were evolving. So the program did more than generate demand. It steadily improved marketing’s understanding of the market.
The audience was never one persona
The post-merger suite served organizations with different structures, missions, priorities, and sophistication — and even inside a single nonprofit, a development executive, a communications leader, an advocacy director, and an operations leader each cared about something different. No static buyer profile captures that.
The webinar program let us respond to buyers in motion. The topic someone chose said something about their current priority. Their questions said more. Their engagement with particular demos or resources added signal, and a request for a consultation opened the door to real diagnosis. Instead of assuming everyone with a given job title needed the same message, we let behavior and context tell us which message actually fit.
A consultative next step
After each webinar, attendees could request a free one-on-one consultation with a Salsa expert — and this was not a sales call in disguise. The point was to understand the organization’s goals, processes, constraints, and current tools: what they were trying to accomplish, how they worked today, where things broke down, which Salsa capabilities might be relevant, and whether they were even ready for a platform change.
When Salsa was a strong fit, the consultation opened naturally onto a more specific product conversation. When it wasn’t the right move yet, the team pointed people toward ebooks, tips, videos, worksheets, and other resources instead. That distinction mattered. The objective was never to shove every engaged prospect into a sales process. It was to help each organization take the most appropriate next step, whatever that happened to be.
Many paths, not one funnel
The traditional webinar funnel assumes a tidy line: register, attend, request a demo, enter the pipeline, buy. Real buyers rarely move that cleanly. Some had an active technology need. Some were just exploring an emerging problem. Some needed internal alignment first. Some wanted practical advice and weren’t ready to change systems at all.
So we designed for those different states. Depending on where they were, participants could talk to an expert, explore relevant capabilities, download a worksheet, read an ebook, watch instructional content, attend another webinar, or simply keep learning until the timing was right. Nobody got forced down one predetermined nurture track. They moved through the experience on their own situation, interest, and readiness.
One webinar, a whole content system
The value of each session outlasted the live event. The research, frameworks, demonstrations, audience questions, worksheets, and follow-up materials could feed a much broader ecosystem — an ebook, a checklist, a worksheet, a short video, a blog post, a follow-up email, a consultation guide, future webinar topics, sales-enablement material, and fresh positioning insight.
That compounded. A webinar wasn’t a campaign that ended when the session did. It became a recurring input into the company’s content, demand-generation, sales, and market-learning systems, and every session had a shot at making the next one more relevant.
Connecting engagement to revenue
Registrations and attendance were useful, but they were never the goal. We judged the program by its influence on qualified pipeline and revenue, which kept us from optimizing for vanity. A big audience means little if it’s full of people with no real connection to Salsa’s market; a smaller session can matter more if the topic reaches the right organizations and produces qualified opportunities.
The results were substantial. Webinar-influenced sales-qualified leads rose 5.7x year over year. Webinar-influenced revenue rose 15x. The gap between those two numbers is the interesting part. The program didn’t just produce more sales activity — its revenue influence grew far faster than its lead influence, which says it was fueling more valuable conversations and stronger outcomes, not merely more volume.
The adaptive marketing lessons
The Salsa program illustrates several principles at the center of The Adaptive CMO.
Start with the buyer’s problem, not the product’s structure. The merger created a broad set of capabilities, but buyers don’t organize their needs around a vendor’s product architecture. They experience specific problems. Beginning there made the product easier to grasp and more relevant. Adaptive marketing doesn’t ask buyers to translate a company’s internal structure into their own needs; it translates the company’s capabilities into the buyer’s context.
Relevance requires specificity. A message trying to describe every feature to every prospect goes generic, however sophisticated the product. Organizing each experience around a timely challenge created specificity. The platform didn’t have to be positioned identically every time — its value could be expressed through the particular outcome an audience cared about.
Treat personas as living models. A title or org type is a starting clue. Behavior is richer information. The topics people chose, the questions they asked, the resources they used, and the consultations they requested revealed their current priorities and let us see buyers as changing individuals rather than fixed profiles.
Build programs that learn while they run. Each webinar delivered value and generated insight at the same time. Audience interaction surfaced emerging concerns, sharpened future topics, and improved the demos. The program wasn’t simply repeated. It evolved.
Let education earn the right to promote. Software companies often try to speed up buying by putting the product at the center of every interaction. We put the audience’s problem there instead, which made the demos more credible because they served the lesson rather than interrupting it. Promotion worked better because it followed value.
Use demonstrations to complete the idea. A demo persuades most when the audience already understands why the feature matters. Embedding Salsa’s capabilities inside practical content connected functionality to recognizable outcomes, so the product became evidence that the advice could actually be acted on.
Design multiple next steps. Not every engaged prospect is ready to buy. The consultations and resource library let people continue at their own readiness. Some moved toward sales; others kept learning. An adaptive journey doesn’t treat the not-ready-today as failed conversions. It builds useful paths that keep the relationship alive.
Use conversation as market intelligence. Interactive questions and consultations did more than boost participation. They exposed the language prospects used, the obstacles they hit, and the outcomes they valued — fuel for positioning, content, sales conversations, and future programs. Adaptive marketers don’t separate demand generation from customer research when one interaction can do both.
Measure the outcome that matters. Registrations and attendance tell you whether a webinar got attention. Sales-qualified leads and revenue tell you whether it contributed to growth. Following the signal through the funnel let us judge the program by business impact, not activity.
Resolve complexity through the experience. The combined Salsa and DonorPro offering was complex because it served many needs. The fix wasn’t necessarily to strip out the breadth. It was to build an experience that surfaced only the capabilities relevant to the situation. Adaptive positioning doesn’t always simplify the product. Sometimes it simplifies the customer’s path through it.
The lasting lesson
Salsa started with a familiar post-merger bind: more to offer, and a less straightforward story to tell. Communicating the whole platform at once would have dumped the work of interpretation onto the buyer. So we built a program that started with the buyer’s immediate challenge instead. Educational webinars created a relevant entry point, contextual demonstrations connected advice to technology, interactive questions revealed needs, consultations provided deeper diagnosis, and supporting resources let each prospect move at their own pace.
The result was more than a full webinar calendar. It was a buyer-led learning system — one that helped Salsa understand what the market needed, express the product differently depending on that need, and tie valuable education to measurable revenue.
That’s what adaptive marketing looks like in a complex product environment. It doesn’t hunt for one perfect message that works forever for everyone. It builds a system that can discover which message matters now, to this buyer, in this context, and then help that buyer take the next useful step.